In the comments, Liz notes the unhappy combination of baby products and bondage harnesses, and asks, not unfairly, “What the hell were they thinking?”

Well, quite. I was in John Lewis recently, buying towels, and at no point did I feel a need to know about the cross-dressing bondage activities of the sales staff. Whether the person bagging my towels likes to dress up as a pantomime dame while brandishing instruments of torture was not, it has to be said, foremost in my mind…

Whether female customers, the backbone of John Lewis’ customer base, will be inspired to shop harder and more often by the thought of employees bringing their autogynephilia to work remains to be seen. Ditto bondage fantasies and wearing rubber dog costumes. Perhaps well-off ladies in search of posh frocks and upscale furnishings will be dazzled and enchanted by the thought of sad, cross-dressing men in thigh-high boots who like to share photos of themselves smeared with unspecified white substances.

Needless to say, the accompanying prose is quite extensive. The words “sustainable heterotopic space of discourse” crop up, obviously, and which, as you can imagine, is an enormous help. Quite how one might “exchange ideas” with a plant is, alas, not divulged. 

I’m tempted to ask how these target percentages relate to any actual expressed interest or aptitude – say, among school-leavers – or to any tactical utility, according to which an unusually high number of women and racial minorities would somehow confer a military advantage. Or are they, as seems to be the case, entirely arbitrary?

The paragraph immediately above was posted as a comment on the Personnel Today website. It was held for moderation, then disappeared. 

And so, the preferred, progressive trajectory entails a more demoralised, more dangerous, low-trust society. In which pretty much anything one might wish to buy will be out of reach or shuttered away, and in which every customer will by default be treated as suspicious. Because apparently, we mustn’t acknowledge a difference between the criminal and the law-abiding. Except, that is, to imagine them as more vulnerable than we are.

We will lock up the product, but not the thief. And utopia will surely follow.

Ms Gill is not alone, of course. According to her Guardian colleague Owen Jones, expecting persistent shoplifters to face consequences for their actions is now among “the worst instincts of the electorate.” Because shoplifters are “traumatised,” apparently. The real victims of the drama.

At which point, a thought occurs. If repeated thieving is so high-minded and so easily excused, perhaps Ms Gill and Mr Jones would be good enough to publish their home addresses, the whereabouts of any valuables, and the times at which they’re likely to be out, or at least preoccupied or unconscious.

Or do our betters only disdain other people’s property?